One project fails, another begins

This the fifth installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

I had a few projects I hoped would last through the entirety of my entire time out of the classroom that fell away over the sabbatical. Some of that change happened because unexpected opportunities popped up for me at various points along the way. Other projects just felt less important once I got into the rhythm of working on my novel first and everything else second. And a couple of projects morphed into something else entirely.

One such project was a series of blog posts I called Top Shots, a planned weekly roundup of some pictures I took on my phone simply to slow myself down and pay attention to the physical world in images the way I tend to in my head with words.

And for a while, I did just that, as you can see in the pictures below.

You may recognize this picture from the front page of my blog. This is facing west toward Mission Bay in the end, the sun piercing the clouds in the same moments a long bout of depression lifted for me.

San Diego’s 163 Freeway, in a rare moment of open road.

The view from Sunset Cliffs. To think, I used to drive past this view almost daily on the way home from work.

Street art meets commerce on University in Hillcrest.

But, as Frost put it, way lead on to way and I just couldn’t find the space for the space I was trying to make there. 

To say this was frustrating is an understatement, even as the project was supposed to be light and really just for me. But, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I really don’t have an off-switch for feeling bad about letting projects go. Even the light ones.

Sometime in the summer, as I grudgingly started thinking about going back to the classroom, it occurred to me that I had not been back to the Top Shots well in some time and I started scrolling my Instagram feed for shots I might include in a new post. It was only at this moment that I realized what the issue was.

I was platforming these pictures on the wrong medium. Fifteen minutes later, I had created an author account on IG with the same handle as my Twitter account and have since been posting all my writing-related content there, including what I might have called Top Shots before. It’s been really helpful.

Something about posting things one at a time as they come to me—Bird by Bird-style—just makes more sense. Maybe it will for you too. Give the account a look and a follow either here or via the widget at the bottom of the page.

You mean I HAVE to go to San Diego for research?

As far as locations that need to be studied go, the hometown is not half bad.

This the third installment of a series reflecting on a sabbatical that ended one year ago. It will run each Wednesday through the summer.

A lot of the work that I was able to accomplish toward my novel was doing extended research on a number of subjects I needed to have pulled together in my mind in order to finally push the story (and the stories that make it up) forward. 

Sometime about halfway through May, a friend asked me what I was spending my time learning about and after I listed several of the subjects in my browser tabs and the books I’d read, she looked at me like I was spouting gibberish. I stopped and thought about it outside of the context of my novel and had to laugh.

My research for the novel includes delving into:

·      Postal network art;

·      Suicide as performance art;

·      Podcast production;

·      Terminology connected with the creation of eight separate forms of art;

·      Security procedures at a decommissioned nuclear reactor;

·      Military supply clerking norms and duties;

·      Portable barricade technology;

·      Police investigative procedure;

·      The history of the Hillcrest neighborhood in San Diego;

·      Ray Johnson;

·      The relative differences between various forms of suicide bombs;

·      Remittances;

·      Marine recruitment procedures;

·      Crime scene photography;

·      Currency markets and trading;

·      About 30 other topics…

This doesn’t include the trips I took to San Diego so I could walk routes and take pictures of where the characters in my story exist in the moments I depict them. Add to this the overlay of the cultural, spiritual, moral, and regional frameworks of it all as my characters range from a day trader to a high school dropout-turned Marine recruit to a journalist just to name a few. To say there are a lot of moving parts in my head would be a massive understatement.  

A key location in my manuscript, in reflection.

Part of a Hillcrest mural that made it onto the page in a later draft.

To combat the near-constant sense of overwhelmedness I felt, I started charting and mapping my storylines, trying to figure out where all of this was taking me. As you can see in the pictures included with this post, even exerting that level of external on it all left a lot to deal with.

With 12 separate first-person perspectives and a shared narrative that absents it’s central figure, some of those charts got complicated pretty quickly.

An early map of the neighborhood where most of the story takes place. Sure, I could have used Maps and dropped pins in various locations. Sure, most of these details have changed. Sure, this is evidence of why I’m not a visual artist. But I wanted a sense of co-creation in these notes.

Graphing paper was really helpful in picturing the exact size and spacing of an important location in the story. This is one of 24 charts of the space I made.

But this work also began to clarify matters I hadn’t been able to get at before. And while I can’t claim I see it all yet, I can see where I’m headed…at least until the next unexpected divergence in the road…

From one of my walking tours of the neighborhood, this seemed like the cliched thing to do.